


A Slight Delay

by AceQueenKing



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: F/M, Guilt, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Canon, Separation Anxiety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 21:09:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21259688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/pseuds/AceQueenKing
Summary: It's the first day of Spring, but Persephone decides that it can wait.





	A Slight Delay

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sir_Bedevere](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sir_Bedevere/gifts).

Persephone wakes up on the first day of Spring with no joy in her heart.

Now it is true that she misses her mama and seeing Hermes up top will be right nice. Everyone else she’s dreading, especially her dad. Persephone, she inherited almost nothing from her father. Not her daddy's name, or his money, or even his looks; people joke that she, like her sister, allegedly sprung fully formed from her mama’s head, _no man needed at all, no siree, that’s mother nature for you_, but Persephone knows that ain't true because she got one thing from her storm-front father, just one small, but not at all insignificant little thing: Persephone can smell a storm coming a mile off.

Now being a goddess of nature herself, she's been responsible for a few in her time, but when she wakes up in middle-March, with her husband's fingers already on her shoulder, clinging tight, she smells a deep frost coming, a bad storm brewing, and she doesn't open her eyes right away.

But he knows. He always knows when she wakes up; doesn't know rightly how he figures such, but he does. Observant man he is, and in so many ways. Makes him real good at a lot of things…and real bad at this one.

"Good morning," his voice says, and his deep voice is so cold it feels like the tip of an icicle sliding into her ear. It's so sharp she feels like if she so much as moves, his icicle will come on down and pierce her skull. She makes a little noise of protest and burrows into their covers, even though the Underworld isn't nearly so cold as it once was.

The blankets, like the man himself, are more suffocating than they used to be.

"Come on, _lover_," he adds, shaking her shoulder; his hand stays there. Big palm. _Cold_. "Can't waste our time." A bit of resentment to his voice there; he ain't happy she ain't said much yet, or opened her eyes, or shown him a second of her time. She knows this. And yet, she doesn't give it to him; she stretches languorously, lets him see all the curves and lines of daughter nature and even with her eyes closed, she feels his eyes watching her. Dragging out waking up is her own petty revenge for him waking up in a mood so icy-cold, but her vengeance doesn't warm her up none, either. Ain't fair to her to demand so much of her time, but, then again, ain't fair to him, she knows, to hold this against him, this desire to spent time with his wife when he’s got less time than anyone else in the family. She wonders how long he's been curled up watching her sleep; a while, she'd guess.

Loves her very much, he does.

That thought makes her stomach clench and she blinks, yawns only a little as she opens her eyes and looks up at him; he's looking at her, of course. Always is and always does. Those eyes are sharp things, and none too kind. He's an intense man, her man, and she feels all the edges and sharp corners of him as she turns to face him. "Good morning," she says, though it isn't morning, not really; underworld doesn't have anything like mornings or nights. Doesn't exactly have seasons either, except for her coming and going.

And they both know her going is the season he hates the most.

She runs her arm up his side and feels all but cut to ribbons when he doesn't smile.

"First day of Spring," he says, choked up, and then he tries to smile but fails; his face falls into a weird half-grimace. She hears all the things that he don't say in that awkward little expression: _you're leaving me, I'm not ready, don’t go, please don't go, don't leave me_. His fingers tap out a melody on her sternum, and it's nothing but selfish: _don't go, don't go, don't go. _Like a metronome, her man; tick-tock, _don’t go_, tick-tock, _come back_. No wonder he likes machines so much; always was marching to the beat of one.

She takes his hand in her hand and frowns. He is so _cold_. She curls in closer to warm him up, tries to remember how his body used to always fit around hers in all the right ways. He ducks his head to her shoulder; in better years, he might have kissed her neck here, but he doesn't, now. Course, if it were a worse year than this, they might not even share the bed, and she hopes it never gets that bad between them. He is an impossible man to love, but she fears he would be an even more impossible man to hate. 

"Guess it is," she says, and she feels the flinch that ripples through him and her heart pangs; impossible to love, this old man, but he is _her_ old man, her ball and chain both and doesn't she love his attention just as much as she hates his need. She grabs and holds him tighter, both arms across his big back and he doesn't fight it. She glides her fingertips through his hair, which has gone bone white but still has the thick, smooth weight of it between her fingers. Reassuring, that; she likes the weight of him. Steady winter-weight, himself. It'll fall when she goes, his weight. She’ll have to fatten him up again to try to make up for too many nights spent skipping dinner to walk the factory lines, come Spring. Gets worse every year.

"You're cold," she says. "Mighty cold." She rubs his head, his back, tries to warm him up. Knows it's all her that reduces her proud man to such a mess. He's himself a blizzard of love-lorn wind, whipping around her and chilling her deep to the bone.

He doesn't say anything, just holds her back, slow and steady strokes down her spine. He came a few days early this year for her, she remembers. A whole week 'fore his due, but she came anyway, on account of this same blizzard blowing. She looks up; frost on the ground uptop, with snow so thick underneath she can almost hear the crunch of the huddled masses’ ever-thinning boots. Long winter, she thinks; a bit overlong.

He clears his throat and she waits for him to say something, but he doesn't. Silence reins through their room, overshadowing King and Queen both. It tastes cold, silence, and she doesn’t like it much.

Now, she thinks, what he should say, and what he does not is: _I know you gotta go. I know you, Persephone, queen of all that lives and dies, is just doing the best you can. I know you're a good woman, and you'll wait for me, as much as I wait for you, even if it's damn hard for us both. Come tomorrow, and every day until you come home, I'll hold a little amber glass up, and drink it down to the thought of you, lover. Bon voyage. Safe travels. _

But what he does instead is make an awful little reedy gasp into her shoulder; not crying, because he ain't never been the type for going weepy, but a right and awful little sound, like he can't breathe, just a quiet set of those wrenching gasps. She strokes his back and listens; used to be, when he woke up like this, her touch would make it go away. Now, it only quiets it, just a little bit. Her touch is fading, she thinks. It scares her to think there'll be a day when he can't or won't allow himself to be comforted.

Now Persephone knows that she has a role in all this, that she herself should say: _there there. It's alright. I love you and I always will. It’s hard for me to be so far from home, and you are always my home. But I will think of you every night, and I will miss you, so much my heart hurts. I will drink my own tribute to you in the moonlight, every night, and let my hands mix with the dirt so I can touch something of you._ But frankly, at this point, he damn well ought to know that she does love him, and that she always will, and that she always has to go but always comes home, too. Besides, Persephone is tired. She used to say all those things, and they didn't matter a damn bit, that's the truth of it. He can’t hear it, not when he’s worked up like this.

And she knows, deep down, it's her fault, and nothing she can ever say will make it better for him: he still needs what the Patroness of Plenty can't provide. Never signed up for a girl who'd only be half-time, but they're all working with what they have, taking the best they can get and trying to make the most of it. Deep down, she's selfish too; she loves him too much to even offer him a chance to find some happiness with someone else.

She snuggles her cheek against his and he gasps, reedy and needy and exposed in a way she suspects he's never been and never can be with someone else. And her heart breaks; in the time it takes for ice to crack, her resolve breaks, the world breaks, and everything falls to sorrow. The snow thickens in the world above; she sees a little mortal runaway girl shiver as she walks on, and she mouths that she is sorry, but the girl doesn't see it and Hades can't hear it and she knows, knows, what she has to do.

"You know, I think you're wrong, lover," she says, and tilts his head just so she can almost kiss him, just-so her lips almost touch his, just-so they share the same breath and maybe, maybe that will be enough. "Feel how cold you are? Feels to me like that means it can't quite be spring yet. Bet there's a good week left of winter."

His eyes widen; he knows the unspoken offer well as she does. Sharp man, him; misses nothing. His hand tilts to her chin, one eyebrow raised. "That so?" He asks, voice raw and dark and needing, so badly, to be whole.

She nods, because saving her marriage means letting the frost flow; it whips through her conscience, hardens up her veins. She feels the scent of fates-given wind whipping up, and kisses and clings closer to him, hoping to protect him from the storm.

And don't he kiss her back, kiss her back so deep and so true, and what happens next—that's a good time. Even with her stomach sick from what she's bargaining away for this devil's hand—it's a _good_ time.

He loves her so.

And maybe when he curls up against her shoulder a bit overlong after, she just curls her arms around him and kisses the tip of his head. He makes an odd little noise, this one one she likes: a contented little sigh.

That's the thing about Persephone. She didn't get many talents from her daddy, but she got her storm-sense. And maybe she got something else, too: she's seen what happened to her dad's marriage, seen how her step-ma got ox-eyed jealous and how bad things stayed between them when his eye started to wander.

And that isn't going to be them, she thinks. Her eye won’t ever wonder, and maybe she can ward off the worst of his jealousies if she just sacrifices enough. Even if it makes her miserable, even if it tilts the world off its axis above. Marriage is a compromise, isn't that always so?

She reaches over to her side table, pours a shot of whiskey, slings it back. Whiskey's always settled her stomach, and maybe it'll settle her conscious, too, if she drinks enough.

"Wanna drink?" she asks, wicked as she is, and he smiles, and doesn't turn her down. His hands curl tight around her shoulders as she tilts the bottle into his mouth, and Persephone tries hard as hell to think of them as a comforting embrace, and not a cage closing in.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry this treat is late - accidently gifted it to the wrong account due to a misspelling. Doh!


End file.
